Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey Page B

on the back burner until we know what’s the matter,” said Tony to him as he boarded the skiff.
    â€œNothing’s ‘the matter,’” he said as though to a fearful child. “Whatever it is it’ll keep until we’ve eaten and brought the boat in. I’ll be right back.” Last words of a life then ending. When, ten minutes later, they returned to haunt him, to taste like ashes on his tongue, they would seem to have come from before the Fall.
    The number he was given to dial had the same New Jersey area code as the phone in Anthony’s dormitory but it was not Anthony’s number and that caused him a moment’s perplexity, for he knew nobody else in that area. It could not be a call from Cathy, for she had headed west from home; that was all he knew—all she herself had known—about her destination, but that much he knew. So it was not a call from Anthony and yet it must concern him. Those words of Tony’s to which he had just condescended so loftily now nagged him: he hoped nothing was the matter.
    This while the unknown phone rang once, twice. Later, hunter that he was, he would liken those final moments of his former life while the phone rang to the interval between the firing of the gun and the meeting in air of the shot and the bird on the wing. Later; at the time he could liken what then happened to nothing that had ever happened to him before. This time he was not the hunter, he was the bird on the wing, and the shot that brought him down, that placed a pellet in his every vital part, was the president of Princeton University’s informing him, with a heavy heart and with a father’s sympathy, that his son Anthony had committed suicide.
    He could just imagine what a father must feel on being told that his child had died in an accident or been killed in combat or died of a disease. After the shock of it would come the heartbreak, the anguish, the realization of the awful finality, the sense of loss and the loneliness, the unfillable gap left in your life, your unspent pity for the poor child and your regret at not having been there at the end to soothe him, to say good-bye, your own self-pity and your dread of telling his mother, the special sadness of burying a young person and the inadequacy of your friends’ condolences: he could imagine all this with a vividness born of longing, for these sufferings, forbidden to him, were what his heart cried out for. He envied the man to whom they were permitted as a dying soldier might envy his neighbor in the next bed merely maimed by the same projectile. His dead son had unfathered him.
    He must do his grieving alone and out of sight and with the consciousness that the object of it had repudiated him and all his works, especially one of his works, his own begetting. Within the space of a minute after hanging up the telephone that knowledge descended upon him. For some while after the conclusion of the conversation he sat with the receiver still to his ear. Finally becoming conscious of the humming in his head he lowered the mechanism. He did not at once replace it in its cradle. He stared at it as though he had never seen one before and knew only dimly what it was. Then there was a moment when he could not recall what he had just been told. It was something bad, very bad, but for a moment he was too stunned to recall what it was.
    The manner of his son’s death had made him a pariah, had put him in quarantine—or rather, it had drafted him into that army which until now, except for thoughts of the Thayers, had existed for him in articles on teenage suicide in newsmagazines in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms and which he had read only because of his friends: their survivors, their parents, people whom, now that he was one of them, he knew to be the loneliest alive, like the multitude of souls in any one circle of Dante’s hell, all condemned to the same torment for the same